Thursday, October 6, 2011

In the early morning coolness under the pin oaks on the sidewalk of the Placid Baker cafe, a Honey bee comes to sip sweet coffee from my lips. "come on bee, there's a whole cup of it over there!" but no, here she comes again the only woman to kiss me in a long time, yet i shoo her away, and finally where is she? "oh, man has she fallen into the coffee? Stupid bee you are supposed to have so much brain power, two hundred seventy skills each of you gals have!"

I fish her out of the coffee and she flies to the window to dry herself off. But i realize, "wow, maybe being drenched in caffein is way too much for a tiny bee like her" So i go into the cafe and get a cup of water and bathe her in it to wash the coffee off of her..

Now she is staggering around in a sunspot on my table. I hope she recovers.

I watch her up close, my eyes an inch from her face, as she runs her legs along her toungue to clean it. Her tongue as long as her whole leg, long enough to reach the golden nectar of deep flowers.

I watch her dry herself off, up close her fur is golden. First she rubs her hindlegs together, then hind leg on middle leg, then front legs from mouth to antenna clearing her senses... yup, probably more than 270 skills! My thoughts run from kissing to engineering. "Where is the circuitry, little bee, to handle so many complex algorithms? You've only got, what? a million neurons?" I do a quick calculation: let's see..., I think it's only a hundred thousand packed into that pea sized head of hers stuffed mostly with the dozens of glands bees have. That's some engineering feat, distributed processing, that we haven't mastered yet.

Then my engineering calculations are distracted by a woman of MY species walking by, flaxen wild hair flowing garments of many colors, free, licking her lollypop she must have gotten from the Pioneer Bank around the corner. The bee, startled, flies off, both gone.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

When I hear the phrase 'occupy Wall Street' what comes to mind is that I wish to fully occupy the city that I chose to call my home, Troy, New York. But alas, there are militant presences that have also chosen to occupy Troy, with devastating effects.

What immediately comes to mind is the automobile/petroleum/insurance/medical/legal/war industry that occupies the very streets and parking garages of troy, that occupy the soundscape and the air we breath. I think of the Hoosick street bridge overpass, a monstrous military presence that some combination of huge automobile industry/government bodies dropped on a once thriving neighborhood like a giant atom bomb, and now occupies that space, exuding It's lifeless larger than human scale ugliness and the violence of 100s of tons of metal and explosive combustion of gasoline every second speeding by at an inhuman speed barely touching the landscape it races past (unless of course it's 'rush hour'). I think of butt-ugly housing projects and parking garages and cheaply slapped together soulless buildings that now occupy the spaces and streets of troy in which i would like to enjoy living, in which once historic buildings were occupying that were built by people who made their fortunes in troy and chose to invest those fortunes in the town they admired and chose as their home. I think of multinational corporations which have at their disposal all the power of our nation's military to occupy Troy and cities like it across the American landscape, who have sucked the life out of those cities in much the same way as have great empires sucked their colonies dry for profit. And I think of the electronically amplified and disseminated entertainment and communication complex that occupy our soundscape, our conversations and our very minds, so that we no longer talk to each other face to face, no longer sing to each other breath to breath, or in fact sing WITH each other, no longer tell each other our stories, and ultimately no longer can think for ourselves.

These are the forces against which I would like to RE-OCCUPY the city that I wish to call my home. If such a re-occupation were to take place locally in every city (with the ghastly Disneyland suburbs contracting once again to cities and farms), then the source of wealth of the multinational banks and their collusion with our government would simply dry up.

So, I don't want to occupy Wall Street, I want, along with my neighbors to once again fully occupy the city I call home, Troy.